Yes, these unhealthy delusions are not exlusive to Western Civilization. Patriarchy, Class struggle, Racism and warfare have been pretty universal. The difference as was alluded to is one of scale. More people means more incidence of these behaviors.

onlooker wrote: Patriarchy, Class struggle, Racism and warfare have been pretty universal. The difference as was alluded to is one of scale. More people means more incidence of these behaviors.

True enough. But there are not only differences of scale...there are also clear differences in degree.

Consider the example under discussion above...human sacrifice. Yes, human sacrifice has occurred at various times in Western Civilization----but never at the scale and never as integrated into religious practice as occurred under the Aztecs. We should all be eternally grateful that Spain conquered the Aztecs and not the other way around.

Or consider women's rights. Imagine what the world would be like if India or Arabia had colonized Europe rather then the other way around. No bikinis ever. Now that would be a loss.

Or consider basic political ideas like republics and voting and basic human rights. These are inventions of western civilization. If Imperial China had colonized the world instead of Europe, people around the world would be lying face down on their bellies to pay obeisance to their lord the Chinese emperor rather then clamoring for their basic rights as free citizens.

Or consider slavery. Slavery was widespread around the world until Europeans decided it was an abomination and worked and fought to end it. Slavery lingers on in a few benighted areas of Africa, but for the most part Europeans and their civilizing influence have mostly ended slavery around the world----a truly wonderful victory for European civilization. And when ISIS appeared and opened public slave markets and claimed slavery was part of Islam, who was there to fight and destroy their evil Empire?....why that would be us, the torch-bearers for western civilization.

Plant, of course, has it pretty much upside down. Yes, there were Arab slavers in Africa before Europeans got involved, but they expanded the practice enormously. And Europeans were enslaving Africans and committing other atrocities there well into the 20th c. Slavery arose again in the Nazi death camps, of course.

And modern slavery is not restricted to a few pockets in Africa.

...research from the Walk Free Foundation based on its Global Slavery Index 2016 estimated that there were about 70 million slaves around the world in 2016, with 58% of them living in the top five countries—India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan...

Of course, people engulfed it a rah-rah pro-Western ideology are going to see all Western negatives as exceptions and all non-Western negatives as norms. Whenever anyone brings up anything negative about the West, P can reliably be counted on to jump in with some form of 'whataboutism.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

If he were your lawyer trying to get you out of a parking ticket, he would doubtless base your entire defense on the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer was a much worse person.

Some people just hate the Western civilization and Americans in particular. As if there were any other cultures around the world superior to it. Perhaps its self-hate or guilt. Or they were just dropped on their heads as infants. The possibilities are endless with this group. A whole lot of virtue signaling for sure.

If all critique of Western and US culture are off the table, we are not likely to get very far in figuring out how we got to this point in the current Great Mass Extinction Event.

But some people perhaps are more interested in preserving their pre-conceptions than in searching for important truths...?

Meh. Cog's flippant day in and day out comments belie the likelihood that he's covering his real concerns that things aren't going well. Certainly avoids admitting that western civilization is undergoing declines on a number of levels, mainly by blaming those who who point that out.

Dismiss any and all citations that don't fit your narratives and shoot the freakin messengers. That'll fix things.

Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person

dohboi wrote: people engulfed it a rah-rah pro-Western ideology are going to see all Western negatives as exceptions and all non-Western negatives as norms.

And people who are engulfed in a rah-rah anti-Western ideology and are going to blame "western civilization" for all the world's ills and see all non-Western negatives as isolated exceptions.

dohboi wrote:.... Jeffrey Dahmer .....

Please keep your fantasies about Jeffrey Dahmer to yourself. Lets try to just talk about the interesting larger issues concerning western civilization that are actually under discussion in this thread, OK?

--------------------------

I have to confess that after traveling all over the world and making my own personal study of existing cultures and the records and art and monuments of past cultures, I am more then ever glad I come from the European tradition. Of all the world's great civilizations I feel more and more that European civilization (including America, of course) marks a true pinnacle in the human story. The traditions of individual freedom and freedom of thought and speech that we take for granted in the west for the most part don't exist in other cultures.

We are truly blessed to live at this moment of history, in this cultural context.

Cheers!

Last edited by Plantagenet on Mon 11 Feb 2019, 12:08:36, edited 1 time in total.

Pick your flavor of doom. Societal, environmental, climate change, or peak oil doom. At the end of each of those will be a socialist white knight wanting to divert money from one pocket to another. They literally can't just state the science, without the ever present desire to social engineer a solution.

Its transparent to me that the science takes a back seat to their real purpose. Which has been to destroy capitalism as the supreme cause of all evil in the world.

Cog wrote:Pick your flavor of doom. Societal, environmental, climate change, or peak oil doom. At the end of each of those will be a socialist white knight wanting to divert money from one pocket to another. They literally can't just state the science, without the ever present desire to social engineer a solution.

Its transparent to me that the science takes a back seat to their real purpose. Which has been to destroy capitalism as the supreme cause of all evil in the world.

As a scientist, I take exception to you lumping scientific and environmental issues like climate change and peak oil in with anti-capitalists. Science is the study of the physical world...the study of the universe....the study of reality. There should be no political reasons to reject science or to endorse science. Intelligent people should understand that science is always a work in progress, but as best scientists can do it our current understanding of scientific realities like climate change reflect our best understanding of what is actually happening in the physical universe.

Not every scientific hypothesis is proven right...for instance the predictions that Peak Oil would occur ca. 2005 are clearly wrong......but all that means is that the alternative scientific hypothesis is correct, and the overall scientific method is validated once again.

Cheers!

Last edited by Plantagenet on Mon 11 Feb 2019, 12:16:16, edited 1 time in total.

Cog wrote:Pick your flavor of doom. Societal, environmental, climate change, or peak oil doom. At the end of each of those will be a socialist white knight wanting to divert money from one pocket to another. They literally can't just state the science, without the ever present desire to social engineer a solution.

Its transparent to me that the science takes a back seat to their real purpose. Which has been to destroy capitalism as the supreme cause of all evil in the world.

..... then Cog takes it a step further by inventing reasons that people express their concerns or devote their energies to quantifying the scale of our impacts on the planet. Cog knows what everyone's motives are. All-seeing and all-knowing is he! It must be a terrible burden.

Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person

Look, all personal affection for matters of Doom aside, it's hard to justify any alarm over anything short of a nuclear war, a giant meteor impact, or a super-volcano eruption. Those last two in particular have happened more than once, but are not predictable.

But all the favorite Doom scenarios seem pretty tame compared to the biggies above. Economic conniptions, forced major lifestyle changes, famines, pandemics, wars, overpopulation, etc. - even the favorite Doom of all around here, Climate Change - seem pretty small and lame compared to the things that have already happened, that the human race or it's predecessor species survived.

Then there are the embarrassing but completely true statistics that say that in spite of all the imagined and feared portents, in spite of the ever growing numbers of humans, things are on average improving and humans are today better off than ever before.

I have to say, I see no reason why we cannot survive and continue to survive for decades, or centuries, or indefinately, as things are changing at a slow and steady pace. It is possible that the ultimate carrying capacity of the planet is 10/20/30 billion humans. The oil peak when it happens will take decades to be felt, and is a disruption to energy-intensive lifestyles for the most part - and it will be decades before it is life threatening.

It seems most likely that human extinction may never happen. Very possibly the species that inherits the Earth may have human ancestry.

Cog wrote:Some people just hate the Western civilization and Americans in particular. As if there were any other cultures around the world superior to it. Perhaps its self-hate or guilt. Or they were just dropped on their heads as infants. The possibilities are endless with this group. A whole lot of virtue signaling for sure.

Me think, Western Civilization is a done deal and must go.Left hate it because in their believes it is patriarchal, overly coservative, anti gay, cis, etc.Right hate it because in their opinion it is socialist, decadent, infested with feminism etc.

So there is an apparent agreement in both camps that Western Civillization is good for nothing and it must go.

KaiserJeep wrote:But all the favorite Doom scenarios seem pretty tame compared to the biggies above. Economic conniptions, forced major lifestyle changes, famines, pandemics, wars, overpopulation, etc. - even the favorite Doom of all around here, Climate Change - seem pretty small and lame compared to the things that have already happened, that the human race or it's predecessor species survived.

Passenger pigeons gone from billions to 0 at short notice.No giant meteor impact, supervulcano erruption or an atomic war was needed to effect their extinction. Hunting and environmental changes made a trick.Why humans should cope better?Hunters could be replaced by bugs and environmental change complete the trick.

" Almost the entire planet has followed the lead of shallow consumption.

We have become a monolithic monoculture of consumers on the planet"

I agree with this, but it is also historically accurate to say that it grew out of Western (mostly British, at first, then especially American) culture. So if we want to discover its origins, and perhaps for the seeds of its undoing, I believe we have to start by looking there.

But, also, in the current moment, yes, we have to address the now global culture that perpetuates the travesty.